I would also point out that some upstream repackagers of CPAN distributions can be picky over the how the license is presented. I've been contacted once or twice by debian maintainers asking me to fix some parts of my license and copyright information. In that case my module was a dependency of a module they were packaging, so even if you think your stuff is small you never know the long tail effect and one bad license in the dependency chain can bring the whole thing down.

Its easy to add this, so not sure why you'd not. I just assume people don't because there is still too much black art to preparing stuff for CPAN (a whole different issue, really) and people just cargo cult stuff that seems to work.

I noticed that CPANTS doesn't have a check for LICENSE (like it does for README etc) -- getting that check in would likely improve things.

e.g. I just noticed that some of my uploads (of dists I'm comainting for others, that use older packaging mechanisms like Module::Install or vanilla EUMM) don't contain a LICENSE, but since I look at my kwalitee ratings, this is something I'd notice and fix in subsequent releases if there was a metric for it.

- 'all_from' can be used instead of 'license', as long as there is a LICENSE section in the .pm file;
- Makefile.PL *must also* do 'auto_lieense;' (via Module::Install::AutoLicense) to actually generate the file - the 'license' directive merely adds an entry to the metadata but doesn't generate the LICENSE file.